Book Review: Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children

I decided to buy this book solely because of the spooky cover. Not to mention the review given by my recently liked author John Green. I was also delighted to note that this novel will have pictures. I’ve been tons of books lately and I can’t remember the last time I read something with pictures in it. In fact, I think the last book I saw with pictures was The Little Prince. And that was a hell of a long time ago.

I also would like to emphasize that this is Ransom Rigg’s first novel. It intrigued me even more to buy this since I’m a fan of giving first time authors a chance.

So what is this book about? To be honest, this book started out a bit creepy in a don’t-stay-up-too-late-alone kind of way. I’m not sure if it’s just because of my very wild and creative imagination or perhaps the way the first few chapters of the novel were told.

I’m not a fan of the pure horror genre and I was thinking I’m being drowned into one. Well to be honest, I was really starting to like it. In fact, I kept hoping that the scariness wouldn’t be gone until the last page of this book. I was beginning to think that Riggs can write out a mean Stephen King-esque book for children.

The book, as it turned out, eventually became like, how most reviewers found it, X-Men First Class. The horror was now seemingly becoming kind of like some typical young adult fiction similar to the Percy Jackson series. What am I saying here? Well, I was sort of disappointed on how everything turned out to be really. Don’t get me wrong, I know we can’t judge books by their covers but the first few chapters had me on the edge of my seat. The book sort of lost the excitement it naturally built in the beginning. Not to mention how this had more than its share of romance.

I’m not saying Riggs wrote the book wrong. It’s a great book on its own but I guess it’s really targeted at teens and not people like me who are more than 20 years old. Perhaps it’s still far from the excitement it should have in its sequels. I haven’t exactly read the bonus content on reading the first chapter of the second book but I really wish Riggs would bring that edginess back. Nonetheless, the book retained its maturity that is mature enough for the R-18 crowd.

The addition of pictures was a great idea. It helped the reader no longer imagine what the characters looked like or how some events looked like to the characters in the book. It’s a great way of showing how creative an author can get. The book itself would use photographs to describe things and it’s very efficient. I’m just not sure if this is a good thing to people who’d rather use their imagination, though.

Like for the appearance of the characters, the use of photography made it very easy to know exactly what the people in the book looked like but it also was kind of a letdown for those who think this character should be prettier or this one a bit more scarier. It’s not a bad thing. To be honest, I appreciate it. It’s just that I feel as if I’ve been robbed of my right to make the characters appear the way I want them to be; the right to envision certain events the way I would’ve wanted them to look like. it’s a great thing the author didn’t just use pictures for the hell of it because if he did, the questions about wants and needs would surface and the necessity of visual aids in books would be discussed.

This book is a definite page turner while it is not exactly fast paced. The font is very formal for a Y.A. series. Maybe too formal. The ending wasn’t that great and maybe not enough to make most readers buy the second book. The whole book did not suffer from spending too much time to describe something (because of the pictures?) and it didn’t exactly disappoint in the plot department. Like I mentioned, this book may be solely written for teens. But since I’m a fan of finishing a bunch of book series, I’ll definitely buy the second book. Reading it, however, wouldn’t be prioritized.

Overall: 6/10

Don’t take the score too seriously. I’m 23 years old and I’m sure younger people would give this an easy 8 or even a 10. It’s a good book to read but if you’re not a collector, you can just borrow it from a friend or rent it from your local library.

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